Blog #4

Emotional Intelligence in the Workplace

Published By: Valamis

https://www.valamis.com/hub/emotional-intelligence-in-the-workplace

Summary:

What is emotional intelligence (EI)? Valamis defines EI as a person's ability to identify, understand, manage and harness their own emotions and the people around them. It is said to be an important skill as it has become an area of interest across multiple disciplines including the workplace.

Employees who have high emotional intelligence is said to be inclined to a better career development and is more beneficial for their organization. The benefits they provide is a better team relationship and a positive work culture. Employees who doesn't have high emotional intelligence tend to struggle to manage their feelings. Which results to them acting impulsively without consideration of the consequences of their actions.

Emotional intelligence in the workplace can be seen with colleagues supporting each other reducing stress, giving constructive feedback, keeping calm and productive under pressure, helping to resolve conflicts between team members, and creating a workplace where people are free to openly express themselves. 

The article states that hiring emotionally intelligent staff can produce an even greater return. It has an effect on job satisfaction and job performance. It generates benefits for the organization such as higher productivity, lower employee turnover, and greater loyalty and engagement. Research by TalentSmartEQ found that 90% of top performers scored high for EI. Another research from Institute for Health and Human Performance shows that more than 80% of competencies that differentiate top performers belong in the domain of EI, and that executives with high EI increases their chance of being highly profitable.

They provided 5 tips for ways to improve EI in the workplace. One of them is understanding your emotions to be able to assess your weakness. The second is to get feedback as we can't always make good judgements, its better to ask for a second opinion from someone who knows you well enough. Third is respond don't react, which is to assess a stressful situation before reacting impulsively. Fourth tip is active listening it helps to prevent misunderstandings and shows respect to the person speaking. The final tip they provided was to practice, because it takes time and experience to truly develop your EI.

Personal Relation:

The tips are a helpful guide to increase my emotional intelligence. I find that out of the 5 tips they provided what personally helps me the most is getting feedback from other people. Getting a second opinion is really helpful because I get to hear from a different perspective. It's easy to make self judgments but hearing from another person increases my self awareness and knowledge about how others view me. 

What I use the most at my workplace is active listening. Showing full attention by actively listening makes the other person feel very valuable which increases confidence in themselves. It's important for an individual to build up confidence as it allows them to do more things without feeling much judgement.